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Rubys - 2014 - Literary and Visual Arts Grantees

The Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance (GBCA) is pleased to announce the eight artists selected for the second round of Rubys Artist Project Grants. Grants from $4,000 to $10,000 were made to support artists that reflect a diversity of talent and creativity for projects including fiction, poetry, experimental prose, drawing, installation, and two art books.

The 2014 Rubys grantees in Literary and Visual Arts are:

Amy Bernstein, Baltimore: to support Work Force, a one-act comedy featuring a cast mainly of adults with disabilities and which addresses the shared struggles to find place and purpose in life. A pre-show panel discussion will highlight the challenges and preconceptions facing artists labeled as disabled.

Amanda Burnham, Baltimore: to support RFP, a “living drawing” installation and subsequent art book that will be designed in dialogue with Baltimoreans responses when asked to describe their visions, ambitions, and ideas for the city’s future.

Zoe Charlton, Baltimore: to support Cultural Currency: Tourists, Trophies, and Tokens, a series of large-scale figure drawings that will contribute to discussions of blackness/otherness by a strategic shift in subject matter in which White women and men are depicted adorned with objects representing their exoticized relationships with ethnicity.

Lola Pierson, Baltimore: to support A Day by Yourself, a collection of twelve short stories that embrace action, tone, and other theatrical elements as expressed through language. The structure of the work will be cumulative rather than a linear narrative, and will present a series of literary snapshots, constructing a whole that is more than the sum of its parts.

Rubys grantee in Literary Arts Rebekah RemingtonRebekah Remington, Catonsville: to support the completion of Sliced Bread and Wine, a book-length manuscript of meditative lyric poems that explores the fraught intersections of mothering, consumer culture, and the redemptive act of making.

Rubys grantee in Literary Arts Gregg WilhelmGregg Wilhelm, Baltimore: to support the completion of Backbeat the Waves, a novel set in 1977 in Patapsco City, in which an ailing one-armed cousin from Appalachia upends the world of a teenaged protagonist. Also supported is a related city-wide literary geo-caching campaign and public lecture.

Rubys grantee in Literary Arts Melissa WyseMelissa Wyse, Baltimore: to support Moon Over Sand Island, a collection of short fiction set during World War II and linked by its characters’ complex relationships with wartime Hawaii. The stories delve into the experiences of lei sellers, soldiers, civil servants, and pineapple plantation workers who wrestle with the ties of nationality, gender, and ethnic identity.

Rubys grantee in Visual Arts Lu ZhangLu Zhang, Baltimore: to support I Spent a Year with The George Peabody Library, a site-specific book that documents the artist’s exploration of the Library’s archives and which will reside in its permanent collection and be part of an accompanying exhibition.

All of the artist projects begin immediately or are already underway and they will be developed over the course of the next 12 months. Each project includes opportunities for public engagement such as an exhibition, reading, or panel discussion. Information on attending a public component of a project will be announced on the GBCA Blog.

Download the full press release here.

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